Chicago election problems: Hurdles abound for many city voters

New polling places, website crash and a few judges among difficulties

Voters lline up at Kozminski Community Academy in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Tuesday. (Heather Charles, Chicago Tribune)

Hundreds of frustrated Chicago voters were shuffled around polling places, asked for identification, yelled at by aggravated election judges and left holding the wrong ballots Tuesday amid confusion and electronics problems that by day's end had elections officials holding a news conference to apologize.

By 8 p.m., the city elections board had fielded nearly 1,500 calls about voters unable to find their polling place.

The problem began weeks ago, when many voters ignored mailings to about 20 percent of voters informing them that their longtime polling places were changing because of the 2010 census. It got worse fast Tuesday morning when the city's elections website crashed under a deluge of hits — both from stranded voters on smartphones and anonymous computer servers suspected of intentionally overloading the system.

The website crash and confused election judges left voters like 35-year-old Heather Boggs going from polling place to polling place in a futile effort to find her name on the voting rolls.

"I am pretty frustrated. I don't think I'm going to vote," Boggs said outside the third polling place she tried in vain, Coonley Elementary School on the North Side. Unable to vote and needing to get home to her children, Boggs was angry.

"I am pretty disappointed," she said. "The people didn't know what they were doing."

Brogan Pilkington would likely agree.

The Columbia College Chicago junior was ready to vote in her first election. She said she had an Obama yard sign, a new voter registration card and a sample ballot reflecting her research on candidates for everything from president to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

But the 20-year-old never cast a ballot. Instead, she said, she trudged around the city for four hours trying to vote after election workers at a polling place near her River West home couldn't find her name on the list. So began her fruitless odyssey to find the right polling place.

"I wasn't going to give up until it was 7 p.m. and the polls closed or I voted," she said.

While Pilkington was confident that Obama would win Illinois, she said it still was tough not having her voice heard.

"This was really important," she said. "I really care about what happens in our society."

After the slew of polling problems came to light, Langdon Neal, chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, apologized at an afternoon news conference.

"We had a bit of a bumpy ride this morning," he said. "We apologize for those two hours of a bumpy ride. We think we have righted the ship."

About 6:30 a.m., deluged by an unprecedented demand for help, the website crashed, and it didn't come back online until late afternoon. From there, the problem mushroomed. Also down was the number to text for polling location help. The crashed site then prompted "a tremendous crush of phone calls," Neal said, and that also became overwhelmed.

"We pride ourselves on being ahead of the voters. Unfortunately, this time we find ourselves playing catch-up," he said. "We need a more robust website."

Neal said it took a couple of hours to reroute the Web traffic to the state elections website, and that by 5 p.m. the city site was up and running with beefed-up firewall protection. He said his office was still investigating the possibility that there was a deliberate attempt to overwhelm the system, called a denial-of-service attack, but "we have no evidence to support that at this time."

Neal said the problem also was complicated by a few errant election judges who — trained to facilitate the vote — instead "looked to interfere with the process."

In President Barack Obama's old polling place, for instance, observers from Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office reported an "evasive" judge and suspicions that blank ballots had "mysteriously" disappeared. In several other precincts, voters reported that judges were improperly demanding official identification. In another, voters legally on the rolls were told to go to another precinct, said James Allen, a Chicago elections commission spokesman.

"We have never needed a category in our complaints database for suppression," Allen said. "Maybe we do now."

All those incidents were under investigation by Neal's office. He said any judges who intentionally tried to frustrate the system will never be judges again. In all on Tuesday, only three judges were removed for cause — one for being sleepy, another for her belligerence toward voters and another for intoxication.